When timetracking blocks efficiency
From the The Money Files Blog
by Elizabeth Harrin
A blog that looks at all aspects of project and program finances from budgets, estimating and accounting to getting a pay rise and managing contracts.
Written by Elizabeth Harrin from RebelsGuideToPM.com.
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The second edition of Shortcuts to Success: Project Management in the Real World is now out and I had to ditch several great case studies from the updated manuscript. I thought you might be interested in this one: it describes what happens when project managers and timesheets don’t see eye to eye.
Luke Reader has worked for project managers who handed him a list of tasks for the week. A typical list would include the hours completed for each task and the estimated time needed to finish each one already filled in. Despite the good intentions of his project managers he did not find working with timesheets in this way very effective.
‘Timesheets can put a barrier between the project manager and their understanding of what’s happening,’ Reader says. ‘It also annoys the team by treating them as a production line rather than intelligent people who can usefully participate in managing their workload.’
Reader has witnessed at firsthand how using rigid time recording can back-fire, and as an IT project manager himself, has developed a more effective way of handling the work of his own team. ‘The problem with timesheets on their own,’ he says, ‘is that the team soon learn that rather than say, “This task is late, I mis-estimated”, they invent new tasks such as a test cycle or a further review. These are then written on the timesheet in an attempt to show how hard they are working even though the overall work is behind. The project manager cannot tell what the genuine issues are. And while the project manager can go back and challenge things, it means another cycle of going back to people – and time passes, which is something you don’t have on projects.’
Having learnt from the mistakes of others Reader now takes a pragmatic approach to managing his team’s time. ‘For me, timesheets are a mechanism to allow contractors to get paid, internal and external billing to take place, and sometimes for company management to get an idea of what their staff do all day,’ he says. ‘So as a project manager I make timesheets as simple as possible, ideally just having one task like “Work on Project X”, and I manage the people via discussion using the project schedule as the reference.’
I’ve worked on projects where I used timesheets and on those where I haven’t. When we have tracked time, all resources have done it, not just technical teams. Sometimes my timesheet has had one bucket task on, such as when I was loaned from one business unit to another. My ‘official’ business unit didn’t much mind what I spent the days doing as long as they were able to internally cross-charge for my time. A timesheet helped them do that, but it only needed one task on which was basically ‘work for XYZ department as required’.
On the other hand, I’ve had to put together quite detailed timesheets to cover the range of tasks that my project team did from very technical work to business process redesign and all the project management related stuff too. It’s time consuming but very enlightening. Even if you don’t intend to track time long term or have the requirement to do so, I’d recommend that as a time management task you give it a go at least once. We found that the whole team spent the most time on the task called ‘non-productive work and travel’. Not good! But at least having that identified meant that we could do something about it.
If you’re looking for more advice on tracking time on your projects there are more tips on timesheets in a Q&A here.
Posted on: March 16, 2015 08:26 AM |
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Comments (7)
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Arnold Ali
IT Program Manager| GCS
Shuwaikh, Kuwait
Thanks for the thought-provoking article.
About the quote from Luke Reader: "‘For me, timesheets are a mechanism to allow contractors to get paid, internal and external billing to take place, and sometimes for company management to get an idea of what their staff do all day,’ he says. ‘So as a project manager I make timesheets as simple as possible, ideally just having one task like “Work on Project X”, and I manage the people via discussion using the project schedule as the reference.’"
This might work well on fixed-price contracts, where the contractor takes the risk, but is not suitable for cost-plus or time and materials contracts, where the risk is passed on to the customer. This is especially true where overtime can be worked and charged to the customer.
As a Program Manager who manages cost-plus projects delivered by service providers (how I wish these were fixed-price), I need be able to monitor and control what work is being billed.
Hello Arnold. Thanks for the comment, and for sharing your experiences of cost-plus contracts.
diego retana
New Projects, budgets, planning| Palma Terra
Mexico
You´re right Arnold; thanks for the reflexions Elizabeth
hello, i work as program manager with an indian IT company , i do also believe that timesheet and task tracking can't be matched always. For billing and finance perspective timesheets are required but task tracking is different dimensions altogather.
Navdeep Joshi
Sr. Consltant - CA PPM| TBD
Bangalore, Karnataka, India
One of the points I would like to make is that filing up the timesheet diligently is as important as doing the other tasks - irrespective of whether it is managed via a tool or not.... CA Clarity PPM provides the users with a nice way of managing their time. The users can save time for the day at the end of the day, and then submit for approval at the end of the week.... NJ
Dave Davis
Senior Project Manager| Cincinnati Children's Hospital
Springboro, Oh., United States
As with all tools, the organization's adoption and consistency of use drive the importance and compliance. If your paycheck is generated by the project time tracking system, you have a much better chance of timely and accurate data. If it is used as a means of allocating FTE or resource balancing and not directly tied to compensation, the importance to the person completing the time is lower. It can easily be seen as overhead!!!!
Hopefully you're in an organization that only has time entered once and it feeds both payrool and PM tools.
David - great advice! I would hate to have the overhead of completing that information twice. Being paid is a great incentive!
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